Dreamforce Recap

Dreamforce 2017 was a blast.

Firstly, in spirit of Thanksgiving, I'd like to say thanks.

Thank You!

THANK YOU to the team at Salesforce for giving me the opportunity to speak again this year. THANK YOU Mike, Gillian, and Josh for your guidance during the event (on top of your other duties). Speaking at Dreamforce this year was challenging and fun. THANK YOU to my co-presenters, Jen and Norman for being kickass and inspiring. THANK YOU to attendees for your participation during our sessions. THANK YOU to my blog visitors for joining me today.

Now that everyone has been thanked, let's get to the recap.

My Sessions

This year, I had two presentations. You can watch these online:

• Where's The Undo Button? Deployment Best Practices
• From Admin To Architect

The presentations went well, and were a great way to kick off the conference.

The Community

The best part about Dreamforce is meeting up with my friends and heroes in the community. I tried to squeeze in as many face-to-face meet-ups as possible, but four days is just not enough time to see everyone and attend everything at Dreamforce. I won't post all the photos here, but I tweeted most of my Dreamforce pictures. I loved attending the Appirio Reunion, 10K Party, Dreamfest concert, and Michael/ DOMO Cigar Party. The lunches and dinners that I went to between other gatherings were incredible. I loved seeing my friends at the 7Summits booth and making new friends with colleagues at the TCS cafe. Moving across the country has been a little hard for me. I don't fit in with the people in the SF Bay Area (yet?) but seeing my friends, colleagues, former colleagues, managers, and former managers in the Salesforce community was refreshing, inspiring, and uplifting. I'm so thankful for my #ohana.

Apart from being a source of encouragement, the Salesforce community has played such a significant role in my career and in the careers of my mentors, that we focus on it at the end of our Admin to Architect presentation. If you haven't attended a Salesforce conference or user group meetup yet, don't delay. Attend and make connections with others in this field. You'll make friends, grow your professional network, AND learn.

My Favorite Session

I think I died during the Meet the Developers session, which is a session that CTO Steven Tamm runs with lead architects to answer our questions about the platform roadmap... This was my favorite session because SOQL Christmas was announced --

• The dreaded CPU time limit error message will maybe be worked on (shoutout @danappleman for asking)
• Select * is coming
• Polymorphism is coming (I wrote down 'joins' -- though I'm not sure if the person who asked included various joins that, in my opinion, are much nicer in SQL than SOQL)
• Polymorphism is coming!
• Polymorphism is coming!!!!!

Bad news: the session was either not recorded, or has not been posted yet. I'm not sure what else was promised because I blacked out after hearing the news about polymorphism.

My Favorite Keynotes, Other Sessions

Admin Keynote
Developer Keynote
Trailhead Keynote
Marc's Opening Keynote
True to the Core with Parker Harris (delivered and roadmap)

Several sessions have been posted online, both on Dreamforce site (scroll wayyyyy down to see different keynotes like Sales Cloud Keynote, Service Cloud Keynote, Marketing Cloud Keynote, etc.) and Salesforce Live (again, scroll down to the very low bottom of the page and expand the schedule to click on session titles).

Some friendlier session navigating is available for sessions posted on the Salesforce Developers Youtube account.

Taylor Swift

Yes, I'm putting a Taylor Swift subsection in my Dreamforce recap.

Taylor Swift's new album, Reputation, was released at the end of the fourth day of Dreamforce, Friday morning at midnight. It is sooooo good. Currently, my favorite song is either Delicate or Call It What You Want. This album will forever be the soundtrack to my 2017 Dreamforce memories. I love her. Maybe sometimes, I love her too much...

On that note, I'm convinced Adam totally won the Lip Sync Battle because he sang a Taylor Swift song. She is queen. (Also, he slayed at Tay and I hope this becomes a thing for next year!)

Final Thoughts

I'm so happy to have been able to attend Dreamforce as a speaker this year. Though there were no major product announcements at this year's Dreamforce, that won't stop me from dreaming about Polymorphism and Taylor's Reputation tour, which is lumped into my thoughts about Dreamforce.

Until next year!